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The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

Monday, December 04, 2006

A Case of the Mondays: Islam is Western

I really wish the people
in the United States, Canada, and Europe who complain that Muslims
are destroying Western culture looked at earlier groups of
immigrants. The same things that people say about Muslims—that
they're an alien culture, that they don't respect democratic values,
that they treat women badly—were also said about Jewish, Italian,
and Polish immigrants to the US a hundred years ago. The things
people say about Islamic countries were true about a significant
fraction of the West as late as the 1970s.

Islam and Christianity
are so similar that they are almost, but not quite, the same
religion. They're both monotheistic, with all the cultural
implications this carries. They both have a progressive view of the
world, in which good works and proselytization will create an
increasingly better world. Their eschatologies are remarkably
similar. Overall, Islam is hardly different from Protestant
Christianity. It's entirely by accident that right now Muslim regions
are more conservative and anti-democratic than Christian regions.
Abstractly, there is nothing that prevents what is commonly called
the West from eventually expanding as far south as the Sahara desert
and as far east as Iran or even Pakistan and considering Islam as one
of its two main religions. Just like there used to be a clearly
defined Catholic West and a Protestant West, it makes sense to talk
of a Christian West and a Muslim West.

More concretely, it's
instructive to compare Muslims to Jews. When Jews started immigrating
to the US from Eastern Europe en masse, they were significantly more
conservative than Christians on most issues, including all of those
that anti-Islamic Westerners consider now in their assessment of
Islam. They were almost invariably ultra-Orthodox; secular European
Jews typically accepted Zionism and emigrated to Israel or tried to
assimilate into the surrounding mainstream culture. If the practices
of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel today are any indication, these
immigrants were insular, stayed in enclaves like Brooklyn Heights and
Williamsburg, had birth rates that would put today's Arabs to shame,
and treated women with about the same level of respect as Mormon
polygamist sects. As late as 1963, Betty Friedan considered
Jewish-Americans and Italian-Americans as examples of groups that
were more patriarchal than mainstream America in The Feminine
Mystique.

That
Jews are now the most reliably liberal ethnic and religious group in
the United States should suggest that the people who rant about the
Islamization of Europe have a disturbingly myopic view of history.
Jews had few structural barriers to integration; American cultural
policy has always been neutral, neither suppressing minority-religion
civil society institutions the way France does or shoving them down
people's throats the way Israel does. Anti-Semitism ran rampant in
the United States up until 1945, when people started feeling guilty
about the Holocaust, but there were numerous institutions that Jews
could turn to beside the synagogue. Still, the process took almost an
entire century, and the integration of white Christian ethnic
minorities, like Italians and Poles, took only slightly less. If a
similar thing doesn't happen to European Muslims, Europe only has its
countries' own cultural policies to blame.

In The Clash of
Civilizations, Samuel Huntington
defines Western civilization based on liberal democratic notions like
democracy, human rights, and gender equality. Based on that, he
proceeds to claim that the West consists only of the US, Europe,
Australia, New Zealand, and the Protestant and Catholic areas of
Europe. Other people who focus on the cultural differences between
Christians and Muslims are less explicit, but they still seem to
believe similar things, perhaps with slightly tweaked civilizational
boundaries.

The
problem with Huntington's assessment is that it ignores the fact that
it's just a coincidence of the last fifteen years that what he
defines as the West is more or less contiguous with the part of the
world that consists of democracies with at least moderate levels of
gender equality. Thinkers in Protestant countries—including France,
which has been at odds with the Papacy for centuries and fought on
the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War—developed liberalism
at a time when Catholic countries were authoritarian backwaters.
Contrary to Huntington's claim, the Enlightenment didn't begin in
Catholic and Protestant Europe while skipping Orthodox Europe, Latin
America, and the non-Christian world; it began in England and France,
and spread from there to countries that in some cases had been
conservative in culture and government for hundreds of years.

All
this means that critics of Islam, such as Mark Steyn and Daniel
Pipes, are letting prejudice overwhelm their sense of reason. If you
look at the situation between 1990 and 2006, you'll indeed see that
Muslims tend to be more religious, more misogynist, and more
anti-democratic than American and European Christians. So what? If
you looked at the situation between 1910 and 1925, you'd see that the
same comparison applies to Jews and Catholics versus Protestants. It
would even work better because you wouldn't have to contort yourself
to explain why what you say are Western values are not found in
Russia and most of Latin America; you'd need to explain why France
should be grouped with Britain rather than with Spain, but that's far
easier. That period of time saw emerging democracies in Germany and
Czechoslovakia, both of which were dominated by Protestants
(Prussians and Czechs respectively), compared with Italy's slip into
fascism. Applying the same methodology that Christian and Jewish
critics of Islam use, you'd conclude that Catholicism was a backward
religion that threatened to take over the United States via
immigration and high birth rates.

Of
course, many people actually said that, not so much about Catholics
as about Jews. For most of those, democratic values were just a front
for anti-Semitism, because they were a good abbreviation for “Our
culture.” American anti-Semites were likely to worship Hitler, even
though his values were anything but what Americans consider American
values. Western anti-Muslim writers seem to worship Putin's
strong-arm treatment of Muslims, even as he destroys the democratic
institutions they all profess to want to protect.

What
is more, if Western values are defined by democracy, women's rights,
and so on, then there is no such thing as the West, only more liberal
people and less liberal people. Almost every country in the world has
been democratic at one point; states usually abandon democracy only
when it fails to work or when the military is strong enough to mount
a coup, just like in inter-war Italy and Germany. People have been
slower at adopting feminism, but given that Jews and Italians and
Poles didn't do anything to lessen women's rights in the US, it's
safe to conclude that the people who promulgate fears that Muslims
will pressure Europe to adopt Sharia laws are more interested in
hating foreigners than in telling the truth.

One
approach is to conclude that civilizations the way Huntington defines
them don't exist at all. Another is to say that they exist, but have
nothing to do with liberal values. If the latter approach is correct,
and Huntington's basic framework of basing civilizational boundaries
on religion has merit, then Islam is part of the West (indeed, the
lack of a mosque hierarchy makes Islam more Western than countries
where the Pope gets to dictate abortion law). That inclusion should
help shatter myths of Western cultural supremacy, which are
surprisingly prevalent among people who claim that what they like
about the West is its pluralism. Unfortunately, like their
anti-Semitic ideological ancestors, anti-Muslims did not come to be
what they are now due to any examination of evidence, but due to some
form of prejudice.